News for and about the Health 2.0 Community

On January 23 from 11:00am-12:30pm EST, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will be hosting a webinar on the Health Indicators Warehouse data resources and features. The Webinar is part of a series of webinars held by the Department as promotional and educational tools.

Here at Health 2.0, we are focusing a lot of our energy on big data. The recent push is in part a byproduct of the Health Data Initiative (HDI), launched in 2010 by Institute of Medicine in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Initiative is an attempt to use health data to develop robust applications that increase awareness of the current health system and encourage the community to consciously improve health. The Warehouse is a collection of over 1,000 population health indicators that is fully documented with downloadable data.

As an important step in promoting the Community Health Data Initiative, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Health Indicators Warehouse, or HIW (healthindicators.gov). The Health Indicators Warehouse is a web portal designed to provide health indicator data to support information technology development. The Warehouse is home to many data resources, to which many features have been added over the past few months.

The Webinar will serve as a comprehensive overview of the Department’s available resources. Among others, the webinar hosts will pay particular attention to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP). Other sources to be explored include those that are nongovernmental. MONAHRQ is a desktop software tool that enables organizations to quickly and easily generate a health care reporting Website. The tool analyzes, summarizes, and presents information in ready-to-use format.